The Death of the Book
Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading
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An examination of the ways major novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf draw attention to their embodiment in the object of the book, The Death of the Book considers how bookish format plays a role in some of the twentieth century’s most famous literary experiments. Tracking the passing of time in which reading unfolds, these novels position the book’s so-called death in terms that refer as much to a simple description of its future vis-à-vis other media forms as to the sense of finitude these books share with and transmit to their readers.
As he interrogates the affective, physical, and temporal valences of literature’s own traditional format and mode of access, John Lurz shows how these novels stage intersections with the phenomenal world of their readers and develop a conception of literary experience not accounted for by either rigorously historicist or traditionally formalist accounts of the modernist period. Bringing together issues of media and mediation, book history, and modernist aesthetics, The Death of the Book offers a new and deeper understanding of the way we read now.
“In The Death of the Book, Lurz demonstrates serious intellectual agility, moving between his objects of study with complexity and aplomb. In this formalist-materialist account of modernism, readers are treated to a delightful set of close readings of key modernist texts that want to take the book-as-object seriously. Crisp and lucid in argumentation, The Death of the Book is a fascinating account of modernist materialism, arguing that, as critics, we need to go beyond thinking about how literature began to act like emergent technological forms and instead turn our attention to the sensuous object of the book itself.”
The Death of the Book is an admirably detailed and unfailingly subtle meditation of the novels of Proust, Joyce and Woolf, works in which the image of the open book or the act of reading figure the relationship between the life represented within the novel and the extra-literary life of its readers.